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alphadogg writes to tell us that the Internet Engineering Task Force has decided to document the successes and failures of past standards and the reasons why. The hope is that lessons learned can influence future decisions. "Grading the success of the IETF standards can also serve several other functions, Crocker pointed out. It could help working groups focus their thinking on how their standards may get implemented, acting in effect a bit like a report card. A secondary benefit of the wiki is that it could serve as an aid in public relations, a place for the standards body to tout its successes. This is not the IETF's first foray into deriving lessons learned from its own work, Housley said. In 2007, Microsoft software architect Dave Thaler gave a talk at the IETF 70 meeting, held in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, in which he outlined some of the factors that make a protocol a success."

In the mid-90's, when the Web was becoming Wide, even World-Wide (Wow!), Microsoft decided that the web was entirely inadequate for the real needs of computer users. Instead, MS came up with its paradigm for how it would dominate the future of computing in hope of displacing the www. What did they come up with?

I suppose the reason IETF standards are becoming irrelevant is the inability of geeks to move on from their fixation on things like MS Bob. Because it's so much less work to pitch snide remarks about 15 year old flops than it is to write new systems and protocols.

Comic Sans MS is the font equivalent to the auto-tuned musical "star" of your choice. It's a horrible font in nearly every way possible, but it looks cute so people adore it. Also it is the only font from Microsoft with personality, where personality is assumed to include originality. All the usual Microsoft fonts are knockoffs of other fonts except Tahoma, which is as bland as possible in the name of readability. The people have declared that they do not give a shit about readability. And let's not forget

You're thinking of ISO, not IETF. Whilst MS were part of the push to allow patents in IETF standards without a royalty-free licence, they have been a lot less harmful there than in other bodies, perhaps because of the requirement for running code, and since they can ignore the IETF entirely when they want to much more easily than they can other bodies.